Friday, May 29, 2009

As I have said before, Twitter is my favorite Professional Learning Network (PLN). Regular readers (or those just stopping by) have read about my obsession with this service and how I believe it will change education as we know it. But what if you are new to Twitter? Where do you start? Who do you follow? Do you use the web-based service or one of these desktop clients?

Best Colleges Online has created a list of the Top 100 Tools For The Twittering Teacher. While I would not have included all that on are their list (I will let you be the judge of that.) here are my favorites, some I use, some I intend to, from their list, broken down by category:

Managing TwitterTweetDeck: You can create Twitter groups on TweetDeck, so you can keep your school and personal contacts somewhat separate. (This is what I use. There are lots of Twitter Desktop Clients out there but this one is a favorite of lots of users. Other favs are Sessmic Desktop and twhirl.)

Splitweet: Get multi-account management using Splitweet, so you can separate your educational and personal accounts. (If you are like most educators you wouldn't want your classroom account to turn into you personal account. You can use this client to run them both, but don't get confuses...)

Finding FriendsTwits Like Me: Find other users in education through Twits Like Me.

@digidirections: Check out @digidirections to learn about trends and advice in K-12 technology. (Great for Web 2.0 Info.)

There are other categories like games, productivity, and integration that I did not cover here. But I think you get the idea. There are so many tools out there to really get the most out of Twitter, no matter what you use it for, but especially for education. So head on over to the Best Colleges Online Blog to harness the power of Twitter!

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